Now some loony dog breeder has crossed a pug with a beagle resulting in a dog that is neither this nor that. It is called a puggle, a dumb name for an unnecessary dog.

We have two pugs, neither of which bays at the moon or chases after foxes. They do what pugs are supposed to do: they snort, chuff, sneeze, strut around looking important, and jump up on your clean pants. They also hoick, a word coined by my wife to describe the profoundly disgusting sound some pugs (ours) make clearing their throats. Together with these and other vile characteristics, pugs are also spunky, loyal, funny, sociable, and charming. Many crazed pug owners (us) think they are adorable.

So who would want to mate a pug with a beagle, a breed that is anything but adorable? Probably the same tinkerers who crossed a cocker spaniel with a poodle, thereby creating the cockapoo, a fluffy little dog that seems to embody the eternal question, Why am I here?

But then, why would a restaurant offer steak and lobster on the same plate? And who, having made this culinary misstep, could possibly have thought it was a good idea to call the warring combo surf 'n turf? Where did this urge to combine disparate elements come from? In some cases the marriages seem to be haphazard, as with, for instance, the zonkey or the liger.

No, the zonkey is not the result of a coupling between a zebra and a monkey, but a zebra and a donkey. It was probably just one of those things, as the Cole Porter song has it. The same would seem to hold for the liger, which is the result of a romantic interlude involving a male lion and a female tiger. According to some dubious information I turned up on the Internet, ligers can grow to a thousand pounds and will measure 12 feet high standing on their hind legs. Tigons (male tiger, female lion) don't do as well and tend to look a little bit like puggles, although quite a bit bigger.

Then there's the wolphin, the offspring of a killer whale and a dolphin. This makes more sense than is at first apparent for the killer whale is a dolphin, although an awfully big one. The killer whale can run close to 30 feet long and weigh from six to 10 tons, depending on which source of dubious information you want to believe.

It can achieve speeds of 30 miles an hour and it has a great many large teeth, curved slightly backward, like a shark's, and is known to prey on smaller dolphins even if they are cousins and sometime lovers. The killer whale, known as orca in Hollywood, needs more than 500 pounds of food a day to keep going.

This is even more than our pugs eat, although it's hard to judge how much the little dogs actually consume in that much of what we feed them winds up in nauseating little piles of half-masticated slime all over the house. Yes, this is one of those vile traits previously mentioned, all of them best left unexamined.

Worphins, tigons, ligers and the like are the slightly unnatural natural result of wild oats sown in the wild, random randiness in the animal kingdom. It's the planned combinations of the disparate, all the world's surf 'n turf, that is harder to explain. Hasn't anyone noticed that the crustacean abhors its beefy platemate, and vice versa? Is a puggle happy being neither pug nor beagle?

Perhaps if they hadn't been classified as "designer dogs" and weren't burdened with ridiculous names like puggle, neither-thisnot-ot- that dogs would feel better about themselves and stop going around looking sheepish. After all, some of the best dogs in the world are mutts. Any selfrespecting mutt would bare his teeth and growl at you if you called him a postmodern pet.